Vampire Weekend tasting fame

LOS ANGELES — Ezra Koenig wanted to be clear about this: The frontman of Vampire Weekend was not comparing his band to the Beatles. “What we’re talking about is making me think like a fan, which is a little...

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By
Mikael Wood
Posted Jun. 10, 2013 @ 3:44 pm

LOS ANGELES — Ezra Koenig wanted to be clear about this: The frontman of Vampire Weekend was not comparing his band to the Beatles.

“What we’re talking about is making me think like a fan, which is a little bit dangerous because it could come across as me trying to put myself in the same league as one of the biggest albums of all time,” he said, responding to a question about the value of mystery and ambiguity in music. “But, yeah, you think about ‘Sgt. Pepper.’ Is it a concept album about a lonely hearts club? Is it some sort of reevaluation of pre-rock ’n’ roll British music-hall tropes? You could say that.” Koenig laughed. “The album is a thing — a very referenced, understandable thing that’s extraordinarily difficult to sum up in words.” He searched for the right one anyway. “It’s like an element.”

With apologies to those canon-guarding types responsible for triggering Koenig’s disclaimer, Vampire Weekend has created its own element: “Modern Vampires of the City,” the New York band’s third full-length, on which it confronts foundational ideas — think faith, mortality and the concessions required by growing up — in music that reaches toward its own category.

The album is a major leap for a band that began its ascent while its members were students at Columbia University. On 2008’s “Vampire Weekend,” the group used ska rhythms and African guitar licks to punch up clever pop songs about East Coast society. “Contra,” from 2010, depicted a similar milieu with a wider stylistic palette.

The records sold around half a million copies each and made Vampire Weekend — Koenig, bassist Chris Baio, drummer Chris Tomson and multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij — a favorite of critics, festival bookers and Hollywood music supervisors. The band was also an early beneficiary of what came to be known as “blog buzz,” though its broad appeal among undergraduates led to a kind of prep-rock caricature.

“Our first record was very easy to turn into a sound bite: four dudes from college singing about college,” Koenig said. The singer was sitting on a rooftop deck at the Fox Theater in Pomona, Calif., where Vampire Weekend played a sold-out show in April between its appearances at the two-weekend Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival

“Which I think is an oversimplification, but sure, there’s a song called ‘Campus’; there’s a song called ‘Oxford Comma.’ We spelled everything out so simply.”

That’s hardly the case on “Modern Vampires of the City,” which sets willfully unresolved narratives against sophisticated, shape-shifting arrangements. “Nobody knows what the future holds,” Koenig sings over a demented rockabilly groove in “Diane Young,” “And it’s bad enough just getting old.” Elsewhere, in the haunted doo-wop number “Step,” he quietly unloads what might be the album’s thesis: “Wisdom’s a gift but you’d trade it for youth/Age is an honor, it’s still not the truth.”

For help synthesizing the album’s disparate strands, Vampire Weekend (which took its name from a short film Koenig made during college) turned for the first time to an outside producer: Ariel Rechtshaid, who worked with the band in L.A. after earlier writing and recording sessions in New York and on Martha’s Vineyard. “I knew we were doing things that ran the full gamut, so I thought it’d be good to bring in another mind,” Batmanglij said in Pomona. “And even though he and Ezra didn’t really know each other, I knew they’d get along.”

A well-connected indie scenester whose resumé also includes pop hits by Justin Bieber and Usher, Rechtshaid became a trusted collaborator of the bands. “Any time they’d start to fall into old habits and do something they’d done before — or, worse, something someone else had done before — it was back to the drawing board,” the producer said. He singled out “Diane Young,” which starts like an older Vampire Weekend song such as “Cousins” or “Walcott.” “Then we just took it somewhere else,” Rechtshaid said, referring to the digital processing that soon envelops the drums and vocals. “That was the goal: How do we make new-sounding music?”

“They’re part of that small group of bands — Radiohead, Arcade Fire — that’ve figured out how to maintain their indie roots while appealing to mainstream America,” said Huston Powell of C3 Presents, which puts on Lollapalooza. The promoter added that Vampire Weekend, “more than almost any other band out there, seems poised to make the next step.”

“You never know what’s gonna connect with people,” Koenig said. “One thing I’ve noticed is that the biggest artists tend to be the weirdest. Sometimes it’s hard to realize that because when they get so big, their weirdness ceases to be weird; it’s been mainstreamed. But think about it: The Beatles. Prince. Lady Gaga. Psy.” He laughed, relishing the opportunity to be seen as comparing himself to Mr. “Gangnam Style.” “Literally, all the people who come to mind are really just doing their own thing. It kind of makes it easy to follow your gut.”